Questions for Oregon
Patti Lather
Top 5 questions/obsessions/hopes/doubts/topics:
Located as we are in neither what Bettie terms “conventional humanistic qualitative
research” (St. Pierre, 2011) nor the deconstructive variant that was, perhaps, a
transition into this differently ontological space, we continue to struggle with
deconstructive troublings of a certain praxis of salvation narratives, consciousness
raising, and a romance of the humanist subject and agency. This sets up the
following questions for my contemplations about research.
1. How can Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project provide a model for a montage
book that functions as a social memory and historical index of an underappreciated aspect of the shaping of teacher hiring practices in American
schooling, what I call the 6000 pound question of whether we hire teachers
or coaches? Perhaps more generally useful, what geography of knowledge
shapes what feminist analysis is and might become in the space of such a
project?
2. What unexpected angle might a “becoming feminist” diffractive methodology
provide, a “becoming with” in ways not already coded, where a researcher
actively resists their own interpretation and a different subjectivity and
subject position are materialized in this “intra-relational” method of
“thinking through the body” that crosses the humanities and the sciences
toward more intra-active, webbed and networked understandings of the
messy and fluid objects of the world?
3. Given Spivak’s (2012) cautionary definition of theory as what we call
philosophy today; something we can hide behind; something to help us read
the world; something to help us change the world; something we use in
bullying: how can this be used to situate us in the “materialist turn” as
something more and other than “the next new hot thing?”
4. Deborah Britzman (1999) has written of what she calls “thoughts awaiting
thinkers” and that has been my experience of, again, trying to take yet one
more turn, this time into “feminist post-postmodernism.” Shifting from
objects to assemblages and from proliferating and competing paradigms to
meta-method across disciplines, I find myself “in-between” in my thinking of
key questions. For example, what happens to agency if intra-action becomes
the motor of a distributed agency that breaks with the more subject-centered
identity and social/psychic entanglements of humanism? What happens to
reflexivity if it is caught up in discursivity at the expense of materiality? What
happens to praxis when theories of the subject shift from an epistemology of
human consciousness to a relational ontology?
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5. While representing what we are trying to get over, these are practices we
don’t know how to do without. What kind of methodology can move us away
from the theories and practices whose grip on us we are trying to break?
What has to be let go of? Of what do we/will we not let go? What continues to
haunt the (be)coming methodology? How do we ontologize what remains in
the next generation of qualitative inquiry and collectively imagine
sustainable possible futures via new thought and present-based practices of
everyday life?
Top five books etc.
1. Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre, especially The Arcades Project (Harvard
University Press, 1999), an unfinished assemblage that explores the intersections of
art, culture, history and politics through the figure of the Paris arcades, a precursor
to shopping malls. A study of dominant motifs that concretely immerses the reader
in a milieu, the book is a vast montage, a palimpsest, a fragmentary wealth of
perspectives and methodological inventiveness, an exemplar of the demand that
writing be reinvented for each topic and every occasion. A meditation on an ethos, it
works to strip away the lies we tell ourselves—unmaking deceptions, it portrays the
demented rationality at work in the construction of early modernism. Its focus is on
images of desire, dream factories. Choppy, it is a sort of anti-book assembled across
a variety of editorial interventions, particularly those of Theodor Adorno.
The Arcades Project is a culmination of Benjamin’s interests and skills, a sort
of archive or assemblage of collectibles and interpretive angles, including drafts of
early iterations. A patchwork of citations and commentary, rather than a “mere
notebook,” Benjamin’s book enacts the “ruin” of a project that, while a blueprint, is
also what it is: a sort of diary of when a research project becomes the “thing itself”
and, perhaps, transcends book form.
2. Karen Barad’s oeuvre. I find her 2012 interview in New Materialism: Interviews
and Cartographies, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin especially cogent and
accessible. This interview ends, suggestively, with Barad’s growing interest in
Derridean ideas of justice and ethics, see van der Tuin (Humanities, 2014, doi:
10.3390/h3020244) who notes Barrad’s turn to Derrida.
3. For AESA, I am working with Deborah Britzman and Janet Miller on a session
where, at Deborah’s suggestion, we all use Roland Barthes The Preparation of the
Novel (Columbia University Press, 2011) to situate ourselves in our new work.
Barthes focus on all that goes into the setting up for a work is proving very
provocative as I wrestle with the idea of a virtual book that may never actually be
finished. I am also using Brian Massumi’s 2002 book, Parables for the Virtual for this
project, trying to understand it, now, again.
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4. There is a new generation coming along that is helping me in my new turn. I keep
(re)reading Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research (Jackson and Mazzei,
Routlege, 2012) as a “how to” and Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi seems to have her finger on how
to materialize a methodology. I also appreciate the work of Elizabeth de Freitas. Her
2014 AERA conference paper, for example, is exciting in how it exceeds its form in a
kind of spill-over of vitality. She has “sections to be included in longer paper” at the end;
she concludes with provocations about her own efforts “to tap into speculative arts-based
forays into big data” that she does not have time to go into, while announcing how she
finds these forays “disturbing” and “I’m not quite sure how to make sense of them.” This
announces work to come for which I can hardly wait. Trying to “get inside” this new
generation of feminist thinkers for what they have to teach me about the material turn, I
can hardly keep up and that is quite exciting for getting over the feeling of “been there,
done that” that can come toward the end of one’s career.
5. Writing the post-qualitative and materializing practices that do not yet exist might be
inspired by cultural events such as the documentary, “The Act of Killing.” Recently
nominated for an Academy Award, this film interviews the leaders of Indonesian death
squads active in the mid-60’s. Having them re-enact their now too long in the past to be
prosecuted killings, a multilayered participatory design unfolds as a member check unlike
any I have ever seen. Allowing the killers to see themselves on their own terms, through a
sort of “drama therapy” (LaSalle, 2013) of repeated viewings and enactments, the
filmmaker plays with fire in exposing a regime of impunity out of the actors’ own
vanities, love of gangster movies and everyone’s necessary complicities. The film was
shown in Indonesia and, by some reports, has transformed its sense of history in a truth
and reconciliation sort of format. Delivering hard truths, the filmmaker has produced
something devastating that you don’t get to not see.
5 Questions for participants
1. What kind of “I” is viable given what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls a fatigue with
the affective inflation that seems counter to a post-human subject.
2. What are the traps of humanism? What practices help resist its gravitational pull?
What does advocacy look like under the post-post?
3. With thanks to Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual (2002), in the
negotiations between philosophy, science and art, can science risk “becoming
philosophical”? How can the pragmatisms of “radical empiricism” help in addressing
this question? Must philosophy part company with the sciences that adhere to
classic views of the real and truth? Must philosophy, too, fail to be itself in its fatal
attraction to science? What happens to the “two cultures” thesis in any new
dispensation around such matters?
4. If “the complexity of a field of forces” becomes the focus in assessing responseability in the face of power imbalances, how do we draw lines in terms of situating
our research without falling into an infinite regress of context and description?
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5. Ontologizing indeterminacy means to think differently about the subject and
agency within and beyond the reflexive turn, to redefine objects as more in
networks than in single sites, to trouble identity and experience and what it means
to know and to tell. In Rancierian terms (2009), this is a redistribution of the
sensible, a change in common sense regarding “the order of things” that has much to
do with the politics of a science of indeterminacy. What would such work look like
and how might it find an audience outside the academy? Where might Massumi’s
“powers of contagion” so common to pop culture fit into the spread of such ideas? In
this, how might we move from what needs to be opposed to what can be imagined
out of what is already happening, embedded in an immanence of doing?
Compelling Intersections of Conference Themes: “new” feminist materialisms and
indigenous knowledges and anything to do with “smart” quantitative methods. For
example, Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology, Maggie Walker
and Chris Anderson (2013, Left Coast Press) is quite exciting in combining the latter 2
with a feminism of the “critical” variant, with a smattering of Foucault for good measure.
5 Key Words/terms I’d like to hear less of: policy driven research, evidence based
practice, constructivism, autoethnography and its attendant “feelings, ” accessible writing
styles
5 key words I’d like to hear more of: materialize, post-qualitative, philosophical
ethnography, smart mixed methods, and, finally, in Lauren Berlant’s words, a
desubjective queerness” (Cruel Optimism, 2011, p. 18) that is not so much internal
self-involvement mired in narcissism as a sort of counter-affect that works against
the “inflated poetic interiority” (p. 157) of a liberal investment in emotional
authenticity, what Berlant terms “the demand for a feeling fix” (p. 176) that is a kind
of “noisy affectivity.”
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